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Bringing a School Shooting to the Screen

You run away after opening night as fast as you can; I try not to read reviews. I do not want to know what other people think of how I think.

CHEN SHI-ZHENG

Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

THE innovative opera director Chen Shi-Zheng is looking not-so-fresh after the red-eye flight from Los Angeles, where he screened his intentionally disturbing film, “Dark Matter,” a fictionalized version of a 1991 shooting by a distraught Chinese graduate student who killed five University of Iowa colleagues and himself at a physics department meeting. The stunned audience at Caltech clapped and cried. Perfect.

He is ever the provocateur, only this time he is not presenting a 19-hour production of “The Peony Pavilion,” the landmark 1999 opera that had its premiere at the Lincoln Center Festival; or the unconventional “Monkey: Journey to the West,” a child-friendly circus opera bound for the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in May. “Dark Matter” (in cosmology, dark matter is the unseen substance whose gravitational force shapes the universe) is Mr. Chen’s first foray into filmmaking and lasts just 88 minutes.

“I wanted to create the cinematic equivalent of a Chinese scroll painting,” he says. “To many Chinese students in the early 1990s, the tragic shooting that spawned the idea for this film mirrored their own struggles to thrive in a new and unwelcoming culture. These students had shrunk their American dreams to fit American realities.”

Mr. Chen was only 4 when his mother was accidentally shot and killed as she stood beside him in his hometown of Changsha, in Hunan Province, by revelers at a parade honoring Mao, and he perceived the audience’s unease at the California Institute of Technology as a positive. In his view, no one is immune to violence. Nor should they be spared its lessons.

“There is this strange phenomenon among Americans that they feel like they should be immune from violence,” he says, a soft-spoken man of 45 (after two decades as a New Yorker, he remains hesitant about his command of the local vernacular) wearing head-to-toe black. “But violence shakes us up.”

He had, after all, been unable to forget the murderous attack and suicide by Gang Lu, a delusional scientist with Einstein-like expectations for his American education. At the time, Mr. Chen was an ambitious, but culturally adrift, Chinese-born graduate student in theater and film at New York University. How does such a refined mind as Gang Lu’s unravel so irreparably? It happens. The other model for his film is a Chinese college classmate of Mr. Chen’s who attended Harvard on a physics scholarship but dropped out and effectively vanished after feuding with his adviser.

“I still don’t know what happened to him,” he says. “Here was this gentle, brilliant guy who totally excommunicated himself.”

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“DARK MATTER,” which opens in New York City and Boston on April 11, concludes in a blood bath so violent that Mr. Chen, its director and co-writer, refers to it as a “spaghetti Eastern with a lot of music.” The film, which won the Alfred P. Sloan Award at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and stars Meryl Streep, Aidan Quinn and a newcomer, Liu Ye, was withheld from release last year by the producers out of respect for the victims of the shootings at Virginia Tech. It was decided that the shootings this February at Northern Illinois University would not further delay the film’s release.

“I don’t believe in generalizations,” he says. “The shootings at Columbine, at Virginia Tech and Illinois are not connected to this film. They aren’t in the same category, except that all are tragedies and none of them should have happened. I’m not a social worker; I’m an artist. I want this to be a warning sign about the dangers of miscommunication.”

After his mother’s death, Mr. Chen grew up “like an orphan on the streets” (his father, an intellectual and a public health official, was a detainee in a re-education camp during the Mao regime) and began singing opera in his teens. At N.Y.U., he chose not to pursue a doctorate, and did not regret it: He found opera work. He was hired by Meredith Monk as a principal singer in a Houston Grand Opera production of “Atlas” and made his directorial debut in 1996 with the opera “Bacchae” in Beijing, Athens and Hong Kong. He travels frequently and spends barely a month in New York City; he also has a weekend place in Woodstock, Vt. “I go there to reflect and read between projects,” he says. “You run away after opening night as fast as you can; I try not to read reviews. I do not want to know what other people think of how I think.”

Mr. Chen is now suffering from a case of the sniffles, along with his jet lag. For his cold, he is assiduously sipping green tea from a ceramic pot and cups supplied by his wife, Heather Steliga, a poet, with whom he shares a book-filled apartment on Fifth Avenue near Washington Square. They met in China in 1986, when she was on a one-year teaching assignment and he was a lyric tenor with several Chinese opera companies. They were married there in 1987, and moved here later that year. Had he remained in China, he muses, he would probably be a faded pop star “hosting a television variety show on the Chinese New Year.”

When the urge to smoke a cigar hits, he is banished to the terrace, where he shares the space with a split-leaf maple tree that Ms. Steliga playfully calls their teenage son. They do not have children or pets.

“What else is there besides work? Work is everything to me,” he says. Next on his agenda is a production of Amy Tan’s “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” for the San Francisco Opera, and, he hopes, a second film, one set in modern China, where, he says, he feels like a stranger. “There is kind of a dangerous climate where China is maybe being seen as the next big threat, the next big enemy. Or maybe that is just my nightmare vision.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Bringing a School Shooting to the Screen. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe